'Work hard, have fun, make history' proclaims the slogan on the walls of Amazon's warehouses. This cheerful message hides a reality of digital surveillance, aggressive anti-union tactics and disciplinary layoffs. Reminiscent of the tumult of early industrial capitalism, the hundreds of thousands of workers who help Amazon fulfil consumers' desire are part of an experiment in changing the way we all work.
In this book, Alessandro Delfanti takes readers inside Amazon's warehouses to show how technological advancements and managerial techniques subdue the workers rather than empower them, as seen in the sensors that track workers' every movement around the floor and algorithmic systems that re-route orders to circumvent worker sabotage. He looks at new technologies including robotic arms trained by humans and augmented reality goggles, showing that their aim is to standardize, measure and discipline human work rather than replace it.
Despite its innovation, Amazon will always need living labor's flexibility and low cost. And as the warehouse is increasingly automated, worker discontent increases. Striking under the banner 'we are not robots', employees have shown that they are acutely aware of such contradictions. The only question remains: how long will it be until Amazon's empire collapses?
A dizzying tour of the ways technologies, both real and imagined, can transform humanity
The mind of the machine, the body suspended in time, organs exchanged, thought computed, genes manipulated, DNA samples abducted by aliens: the terrain between science and speculation, fraught with the possibility of technological and perhaps even evolutionary transformations, is the territory Richard Doyle explores in Wetwares. In a manner at once sober and playful, Doyle maps potentials for human transformation by new ecologies of information in the early twenty-first century.
Wetwares ranges over recent research in artificial life, cloning, cryonics, computer science, organ transplantation, and alien abduction. Moving between actual technical practices, serious speculative technology, and science fiction, Doyle shows us emerging scientific paradigms where “life” becomes more a matter of information than of inner vitality—in short, becomes “wetwares” for DNA and computer networks. Viewing technologies of immortality—from cryonics to artificial life—as disciplines for welcoming a thoroughly other future, a future of neither capital, god, human, nor organism, the book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.A provocative investigation into the social and cultural implications of the Internet by a leading cultural critic.
As the Internet has become more and more a part of our daily lives, responses to its impact on culture and society have tended toward the extremes, hopeful or pessimistic. Fears that the Internet undermines community, inhibits social interaction, exacerbates economic and racial divisions, and facilitates greater state or corporate intrusion into our lives are balanced by excitement about the transformative qualities of the new medium and its potential to stimulate individual creativity, inspire new social forms, and further democratization.
In What’s the Matter with the Internet?, leading cultural theorist Mark Poster offers a sophisticated and astute assessment of the potential the new medium has to redefine culture and politics. Avoiding the mindless hype and meaningless jargon that has characterized much of the debate about the future of the Web, he details what truly distinguishes the Internet from other media and the implications these novel properties have for such vital issues as authorship, national identity and global citizenship, the fate of ethnicity and race, and democracy. Arguing that the Internet demands a social and cultural theory appropriate to the specific qualities of cyberspace, Poster reformulates the ideas of thinkers associated with our understanding of postmodern culture and the media (including Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Derrida) to account for and illuminate the virtual world, paying particular attention to its political dimensions and the nature of identity. In this innovative analysis, Poster acknowledges that although the colonization of the Internet by corporations and governments does threaten to retard its capacity to bring about genuine change, the new medium is still capable of transforming both contemporary social practices and the way we see the world and ourselves.An interdisciplinary investigation of the co-creation of gender and technology
Each of the ten chapters in Women, Gender, and Technology explores a different aspect of how gender and technology work--and are at work--in particular domains, including film narratives, reproductive technologies, information technology, and the profession of engineering. The volume's contributors include representatives of over half a dozen different disciplines, and each provides a novel perspective on the foundational idea that gender and technology co-create one another. Together, their articles provide a window on to the rich and complex issues that arise in the attempt to understand the relationship between these profoundly intertwined notions.
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